Let me ask you to consider for a moment what the last new thing was that you learned? Was it a song that someone introduced you to because they liked it, or a new piece of information that connected to something you already knew? Was it another aspect of technology that you weren’t aware of, that may or may not make your life easier? Did you learn the name of a native flower you admired or a local songbird you heard? Have you perhaps gone so far as to challenge yourself intellectually and exchange ideas with others about an age old topic or text? I suspect some of us may have to think a little in order to answer the question…and that’s not a bad thing! We humans like our comfort zones where we are familiar with the shape of things in general. Learning new things can take us out of our comfort zone, especially if they are things that teach us about ourselves in ways we are either unused to or perhaps threatened by.
I introduced this week’s message with a question I was confronted with at the Women’s Rabbinic Network conference I attended this week, not in an overt way, but in a myriad of unspoken ways. More than a hundred women rabbis, cantors and educators met to explore the theme of Sacred Empowerment in a Reform Jewish context. The organizers wove opportunities for making new social connections into the conference, there were services every day, and we had a fascinating series of lectures with a lawyer who teaches negotiation skills. On Wednesday we had a truly eye-opening session on the Salem Witch Trials with a Jewish staffer from the Salem Witch Museum … just before we took buses into Salem and held a ceremony at the memorial to the 18 women and 2 men who were executed there. Now this was in a public area, literally on the sidewalk, and we were more than 70 women reading poetry, speaking from the transcript of the accused, singing in Hebrew and finally saying Kaddish. Some people who walked by stopped and stared, some didn’t, and a very few hung around until we were finished and asked questions. Not of me, as it happened, but I take my hat off to the rabbis who engaged with passerby to try to help them understand what we were doing.
What were we doing there? Why did the organizers feel this was an important enough place/issue that it became part of the conference? And how does all of this connect with this week’s Torah portion???? (I haven’t discovered the answer to the last one, but maybe that will happen before Shabbat) The bottom line is, as I learned Wednesday, that when one’s assumptions about how life and society should be structured are under attack one will often accuse another sector of society as having sole responsibility for this. We humans it seems, prefer to shift blame to those outside ourselves rather than accept even partial responsibility for creating the problem ourselves. We can call this scapegoating…but we would be wrong.
Scapegoating in the original Biblical context was meant to allow the people of Israel to not suffer the consequences of their unintended transgressions by transferring them to a goat which was then driven out of the community, supposedly to its death. It was a mechanism that attempted to relieve our guilt in a society that readily accepting killing and burning animals to please God. Honestly, we don’t think that way anymore, do we? It turns out we have a hard time letting go of blaming others.
Puritan society was sure there was an unseen world that had malevolent intentions, and unless they were vigilant in perceiving when that world somehow entered physically into theirs, they would perish. They thought they were fighting for their very souls by excising the evil in their midst. What they discovered was that there is no external source one may blame for the evil that is intolerance, insecurity and xenophobia. All of these are present in us already and will burst forth violently if given the chance – this is my takeaway, not what the Salem community came to understand. The devil really is in the details. But let me not end there!
Many of the people at the WRN conference are differently abled, identify as queer or non-binary, have an ethnic background dissimilar to mine, and all of them, every last one, was my teacher this week. Cantor Shira Nafshi made and taught music that moved so many of us on an emotional level and her partner, Rabbi Robin Nafshi shared midrash that shed light on Torah, just not this week’s portion. The first reform rabbi ever ordained, Rabbi Sally Priesand, not only attended, she was our opening speaker. She read and glossed her book “Sally Opened Doors” in a way that had us howling with laughter and left us only slightly seething. There were a handful of women rabbis who were ordained outside their countries of birth, either because of their unwillingness to deny their queer identity, or because they came to Judaism as adults. We openly recognized and applauded them for their strengthening of the American Reform Rabbinate and for being models of authenticity for young Jews.
In conclusion, my answer to the question I posed is this: we stop learning when we think we already have the answers, when we are too full of our own perspective to allow the possibility of someone else’s view of things to not only inform ours, but perhaps, if we can loosen our grip on “the truth”, to change the way we see ourselves and thus, the world.
Shabbat Shalom Rabbi Leah Benamy
